In Flowing Idols, Dimitris Zarafonitis embraces the empiricist perception of reality that characterizes the Epicurean worldview, as formulated by Diogenes Oinoandea.
The senses are identified as the preeminent normative means by which man manages to define both his place in the world and his relationship with himself. The idealistic obsessions, which rejected the idol as a "miasm" since it was the final product of the distorting act that constituted every artistic creation bound by the obligation of imitation, are definitively exorcised. Now, the role of the idol, as described by Oinoadeus in the Great Inscription, it is completely redefined, as it now takes on a radically innovative dimension, mediating between external reality and its epistemological reception. In a way, it seems to foreshadow the modern operation of the photographic lens.
In Flowing Idols, the photographs of Dimitris Zarafonitis go one step further, going beyond the sterile reproduction of reality that the classical concept of imitation predicted. Completely freed from such conventions, the artist chooses to follow the path of imaginative reinterpretation, articulating a dynamic expressionist idiom reminiscent of Gerhard Richter's painted photographs where painting and photography complement each other introducing a hybrid type of expression.
However, in no case does the artist deviate from his original goalꓽ the investigation of the female body. This is ultimately the main pursuit, essentially using the lens as a means to compose a eulogy of its complexity. The body in Zarafonitis's images is a carrier of an idiosyncratic fragile mortality that acrobats between a world that resembles that of everyday life perceived by the senses and the immaterial world dominated by the creator's personal vision. In this way, the images of the Flowing Idols are not simple records but a real legacy of an alternative "ideas", a poetics of the reality that surrounds us and is waiting for us to discover it.
Christina Sotiropoulou
Art Historian